The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(24)

Eliot wasn’t alone. There was somebody sitting in the chair. The angle was bad, but he thought it was one of the Second Years, an unexceptional, smooth-cheeked kid with straight rust-colored hair. Quentin barely knew him. His name might have been Eric.

“No,” Eric said, and then again sharply: “No! Absolutely not.” He was smiling. Eliot started to stand up, but the boy held him down playfully by his shoulders. He wasn’t especially large. The authority he exercised over Eliot wasn’t physical.

“You know the rules,” he said, like he was speaking to a child.

“Please? Just this once?” Quentin had never heard Eliot speak in that pleading, wheedling, infantile tone before. “Please?” It was not a tone he had ever expected to hear Eliot speak in.

“Absolutely not!” Eric touched the tip of Eliot’s long, pale nose with his finger. “Not until you finish all your chores. Every single one. And take off that stupid shirt, it’s pathetic.”

Quentin got that it was a game they’d played before. He was watching a very private ritual.

“All right,” Eliot said petulantly. “And there is nothing wrong with this shirt,” he muttered.

Eric cut him off with a look. Then he spat, once, a white fleck on Eliot’s pristine shirtfront. Quentin saw the fear behind Eric’s eyes as he wondered if he’d gone too far. From this angle the armchair might have blocked Quentin’s view, but it didn’t quite as Eliot fumbled jinglingly with Eric’s belt buckle, then his fly, then jerked down his pants, exposing his thin, pale thighs.

“Careful,” Eric warned. There wasn’t much affection in his playacting, if that’s what it was. “Little bitch. You know the rules.”

Quentin couldn’t have said why he waited an extra minute before he ducked back down the ladder, back into his staid, predictable home universe, but he couldn’t stop watching. He was looking directly at the exposed wiring of Eliot’s emotional machinery. How could he not have known about this? He wondered if it was an annual thing; maybe Eliot went through a boy or two a year, anointing them and then discarding them when they no longer did the trick. Did he really have to hide like this? Even at Brakebills? On some level Quentin was hurt: if this was what Eliot wanted, why hadn’t he come after Quentin? Though as much as he longed for Eliot’s attention, he didn’t know if he could have gone through with it. It was better this way. Eliot wouldn’t have forgiven him for refusing.

The desperate hunger with which Eliot regarded the object on which he would perform his chores was unlike anything Quentin had ever seen. He was right in Eliot’s line of sight, but he never once glanced over at him.

Quentin decided he would do his reading elsewhere.

He finished Lady Amelia Popper’s Practical Exercises for Young Magicians, Vol. 1, at midnight the night before the exam, a Sunday. He carefully closed the book and sat for a minute staring at the cover. His hands shook. His head felt spinny it was impossible to tellha0. But v with and weightless. His body was unnaturally heavy. He couldn’t stay where he was, but he was too wired to go to bed. He heaved himself up from the broken-backed couch and announced that he was going for a walk.

To his surprise Alice offered to come with him. Penny just stared at the green, overcast landscape in the mirror, waiting for his pale, stoic face to reappear so he could keep practicing. He didn’t look up as they left.

Quentin’s idea had been to walk out through the Maze and across the snowbound Sea to its outer edge, where he had first arrived, and look back at the hushed hulk of the House and think about why this was turning out to be so much less fun than it should have been and try to calm down enough to go to sleep. He supposed he could do that equally well with Alice as he could alone. He headed for the tall French doors that opened onto the back terrace.

“Not that way,” Alice said.

After hours the French doors were set to trigger a magical alert in the bedroom of whatever faculty member was on call, Infallible Alice explained, to discourage students from breaking curfew. She led him around to a side door he’d never seen before, unalarmed and concealed behind a tapestry, that opened out into a snow-covered hedge. They squeezed themselves through it and into the freezing darkness.

Quentin was easily eight inches taller than Alice, most of it in his legs, but she kept pace with him doggedly. They navigated the Maze together in the moonlight and set out across the frozen Sea. The snow was half a foot deep, and they kicked little spills of it ahead of them as they walked.

“I come out here every night,” Alice said, breaking the silence.

In his sleep-deprived state Quentin had almost forgotten she was there.

“Every night?” he said stupidly. “You do? Why?”

“Just … you know.” She sighed. Her breath puffed out white in the moonlight. “To clear my head. It gets noisy in the girls’ tower. You can’t think. It’s quiet out here.”

It was strange how normal it felt to be alone with the usually antisocial Alice. “It’s cold out here. You think they know you break curfew?”

“Of course. Fogg does, anyway.”

“So if he knows, why bother—?”

“Why bother taking the side door?” The Sea was like a smooth, clean sheet laid out around them, tucked in at the corners. Except for a few deer and wild turkeys, nobody else had been across it since the last snowfall. “I don’t think he really cares that much if we sneak out. But he appreciates it if you make an effort.”